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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Get it out of your head
Do not trust future you to remember. Build the cue into the world so the world reminds you.
Lord, ease my task for me (Quran 20:26). Arranging your surroundings to carry the load is a way of easing your own task.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Letting the environment hold your reminders, visible cues placed where you will act, reliably outperforms trying to remember, especially for a mind that loses track of intentions.
Risko, E. F. and Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences doi
Offloading information to the environment, such as notes and reminders, reduces cognitive load and improves task performance.
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Placing cues in the environment offloads remembering onto your surroundings instead of your memory.
Where this sits: Cognitive offloading and externalizing.
Empty every open task from your head onto one list. Trust the list, not your memory.
Getting your ordinary life a bit calmer is worth doing for its own sake. More sleep, a little more structure, food that is not all improvised. Not perfect, just good enough to work with.
A ramp does nothing for someone's legs, and it gets them into the building. Timers, visible clocks, a shorter task list and a calendar somebody else keeps do the same job here.